Jeg mottar en e-post fra sjefen.

I receive an email from the boss.

Breakdown of Jeg mottar en e-post fra sjefen.

• jeg: I
• en: a
• fra: from
• e-posten: the email

Questions & Answers about Jeg mottar en e-post fra sjefen.

What does mottar mean, and how is it different from får?

mottar means “to receive.” It’s more formal and often appears in written or business Norwegian. får literally means “to get” and is more colloquial; in everyday speech you might say Jeg fikk en e-post (“I got an email”) instead of Jeg mottok en e-post.

Why is e-post hyphenated, and what gender is it?

e-post is a direct loan from English email, and the official Bokmål spelling uses a hyphen. It’s a common-gender noun, so its indefinite form is en e-post and its definite form is e-posten.

Why do we say en e-post but sjefen has an -en ending?

Both e-post and sjef are common-gender nouns. In the indefinite you use the article en (en e-post, en sjef). To make them definite you attach the article as a suffix: e-posten (“the email”) and sjefen (“the boss”).

Why is the sentence in the present tense mottar, when in English we’d say “I am receiving”?

Norwegian doesn’t have a separate progressive tense. The simple present mottar covers both “(I) receive” and “(I am) receiving.” To express past you’d use mottok (preterite), har mottatt (present perfect), or the past of få, fikk.